Caryl Churchill. Sarah Kane. Chris Ramsey? Heads turned late last year when the Royal Court in London announced a season of standup, programmed by big shot comedy producers Avalon, and featuring – among others – the co-host of the marital banter podcast Shagged. Married. Annoyed. At one of the UK’s – the world’s, even – most respected playhouses, renowned for the purity of its commitment to radical new drama, “it’s grim to see the cupboard looking so bare” tweeted one critic. Grim, maybe. Unique? Far from it. Park theatre in London recently announced a new comedy strand to its programme, becoming the latest of many playhouses responding to trying times by reaching for the nearest comedian.
That’s happening for a variety of reasons, says its executive director, Catherine McKinney, although “there’s no point pretending there isn’t a financial undertone, because there is”. Let’s be clear: theatre is skint. Costs are up, subsidy is down, the old sources of funding are evaporating. This week, a report suggested that the Royal Court’s literary department, responsible for the cultivation of new plays, was under threat. In such a climate, says McKinney, why wouldn’t you turn to standup comedy? “The outlay is lower than for theatre. There isn’t the need for a period of rehearsal, for complicated sets, all the things that go into making a full-scale theatre production. You can make it happen quickly and easily.”
And with attendance at many venues not yet back to pre-Covid levels, standup brings new audiences to theatre too – including many from sought-after demographics. The Park programmed previews last month of the year’s hippest comedy show, Julia Masli’s ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (before its Soho theatre run), and “we now know,” says McKinney, “that 52% of that audience was new to us. We welcome them with open arms.”
McKinney worked at Soho before the Park, and acknowledges her ex-employer (as do others I speak to) as a pioneer in the space where comedy and theatre converge. But her key learning from them is that “if a space is ever empty, everybody goes ‘why? Put something in it, for God’s sake!’ So I’ve come here and gone: we’ve got these beautiful spaces, let’s use them more.” For McKinney, theatre can save itself not just by programming comedy, but by programming more activity full stop. Comedy programming is not happening at the expense of theatre, she insists: “Theatre remains paramount for us.” Comedy will happen in the gaps between, as will more family performances, community use and other ways to wring the most out of a building that’s been under-used until now.
Jon Thoday has been trying to get comedy into mainstream theatres for years. He’s the head of Avalon, and the man responsible – way back when – for introducing standup to arenas. (That was with David Baddiel and Rob Newman; 30 years later, Baddiel is now part of Avalon’s Royal Court lineup.) “I remember once seeing Robin Williams at the Met,” says Thoday, “and there was something exciting about seeing him playing the opera house.” Is that an anti-establishment excitement? “A bit of that, yeah. I did many years ago contact the Royal Opera House in London to see if I could get that for a [standup] show. And they were very, very uninterested.”
So, always, were the Royal Court – until new artistic director David Byrne took over. Byrne worked with Avalon before on the fringe-turned-West-End hit Operation Mincemeat, and understands, according to Thoday, that standup is a subsection of, and not a threat to, the “new writing” the Court exists to champion.
For Thoday, the argument is simple. Many theatres – the London Palladium prominent among them – were built for variety, not exclusively for dramatic performance. It’s a great experience for comedians to perform in them. And it’s a simple case of supply and demand. “TV is less interested in comedy now than it’s ever been,” he says, so he needs different avenues to build audiences for his mid-range acts: your John Kearns, your Pierre Novellies, your Ahir Shahs. “The Royal Court will have a mailing list, but it may not have people on it you’d expect to go and see standup. But out of that list, some of them will want to come. So this brings our artists to wider audiences as well.”
So is this a win-win, for cash-strapped theatres and rising comedy acts? Or is this the thin end of a wedge that could prise theatre out of theatres – or at least, squeeze the space for the type of theatre that needs big sets, longer-running times, and a quality of attention you arguably don’t get in venues that feel, and operate, like the Edinburgh fringe?
The only concession Park theatre has made to accommodate standup, says McKinney, is that, in their Park90 space, “we’re saying to theatre companies: ‘Can you make sure your set can go back to the back wall, so we’ve got a playing space [for standups]?’” It’s a little thing that everyone’s happy to accommodate – not least because most of the Park90 companies are already making work in an ecology shaped by Edinburgh, work that has to be short, sharp and light on its feet.
Thoday remembers, in the 1990s, “when Edinburgh exploded, and there was a whole narrative about comedy killing theatre on the fringe. But I think it’s been completely proved the opposite now.” He points to the West End today, where Operation Mincemeat vies with the musical Six and The Play That Goes Wrong, and sees a theatre world in the fringe’s image, where theatrical and comedic influences and talents rub up and intertwine.
“The boundaries between the different arts are less hard than people think,” he says. “It’s an old-fashioned view that it’s the end of days that the Royal Court has got standup comedy in it. I think it’s the beginning of days. It would be great if the Court was more supported by subsidy. But it’s also nice that there’s an artform that can help other artforms survive in difficult times.”
